Universities and Economic Growth

This article is about why educational performance is critical to a
society's wealth, how the modern university is not appreciably
improved over the template established in 1088, and proposes some
simple changes that should greatly improve the effectiveness of
undergraduate education.

Can we afford boneheads?

Value of $150,000 spent at Harvard: I drove to downtown Boston with a
guy who was in between his third and fourth year at Harvard
University. I got out and said "Please park the car near my old
apartment. It has a Cambridge resident sticker on it, so you should be
able to find something by driving around the block of Sumner Road,
Kirkland Street, and Irving Street." Twenty minutes later an instant
message arrived: "I parked your car in a tow-away zone for a moving
van. The only alternative was a fire hydrant." A few hours later, I
asked about the possible alternative of driving one more block and
parking the car legally. "I couldn't do that. You told me to park the
car within one block."

Value of $120,000 spent at Emerson College: I hired a summer intern,
who had finished three years studying film and video production at
Emerson College, to work with me on a series of videos for people
learning to fly helicopters. He brought his own equipment to the first
day of filming, including some "work lights" from Home Depot. To get a
clear image of the instrument panel, he positioned these lights
directly behind my $3000 Sony high-def camcorder. Within a minute, the
camcorder screen melted and the entire machine was nearly hot enough
to catch fire.

We know the cost of buying another camcorder from Japan
($3000). What's the cost to American society when we have to take an
afternoon off work to retrieve a towed-away car? More importantly, can
we afford these costs in a declining economy that faces competition
from Chinese and Indian firms?

Scale of Waste

Approximately 14 million students in American 2-year and 4-year
undergraduate programs. Let's suppose that running the school costs an
average of $20,000 per year per student (tuition plus endowment or
taxpayer subsidy) and the lost hours of potential work is worth
$20,000 per year, that's $560 billion being spent annual or about 4
percent of GDP.

The potential losses to the economy from ineffective university
education are larger than the $560 billion spent. An American
university graduate who is not dramatically more capable than his
low-wage counterparts in poor countries puts the entire U.S. economy
at risk of stagnation.

Everything we believed about economic development was wrong

A
Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark, the Chair of the Economics
department at U.C. Davis, challenges the conventional wisdom of
economists about how and why economies grow. Ask a typical economist
for an economic growth recipe and he or she will say "low taxes,
property rights, security and stability." Clark has assembled data on
wages, prices, and rents going back to the year 1200 in England. He
demonstrates that England circa 1300 had all of the things that a
modern economist says are sufficient to guarantee economic growth. Yet
England's economy stagnated for centuries.

What about the industrial revolution? Doesn't that explain why
per-capita living standards in the West increased so rapidly? Clark
argues that Malthus was right: population will expand in response to
an improvement in resources or technology. The result of an increased
food supply will not be an improvement in the average person's
standard of living, but an increase in the number of people, all
living at the subsistence level.

Evidence that industrial technology alone is not sufficient to
generate growth is supplied by all of the poor countries in our 21st
Century world. Nearly all of the world's scientific and technical
knowledge is available in textbooks, journal articles, patents, Web
pages, and other public sources of information. A country that has not
invested one dime in research or engineering can, practically for
free, tap into the fruits of all of the world's hardest-working
nerds. A dusty corner of Africa or Asia might be 10 or 15 years behind
Japan, Germany, or the U.S., but should not be 50 years behind.

Clark looks at why India did not wipe out England in the production of
textiles. Indian mills had the same machines and the same managers,
sent out from England, as their competitors back in England. Yet
Indian workers were so unproductive that English and American mills
remained competitive. Clark gets the rates of "doffs per hour", in
which a person removed a full spindle of yarn from a spinning
machine. An Indian worker could do 120 per hour, compared to 460 for a
Briton and 770 for an American. The machines and tasks performed were
identical.

Clark argues that the more advanced the technology, the greater the
wage premium for high quality labor. A small mistake in a
preindustrial agricultural process meant a tiny reduction in the
quantity of grain delivered. A small mistake on an integrated circuit
fabrication line means the scrapping of hundreds of thousands of
dollars worth of product. A worker who does not follow checklists
consistently is not worth employing in a modern factory, even at a
wage of 1 cent per hour. (Nor would you want to give the
accident-prone worker a $3000 camcorder...)

What lifted England out of its centuries of torpor? Clark argues that
it was a very gradual rise in literacy and a genetic personal tendency
towards future-mindedness, both caused by the fact that wealthier men
had more surviving children than poor men. Because the economy was
stagnant for hundreds of years, the inevitable result was downward
mobility. The children of a rich man would become small-scale farmers
or artisans. Eventually most of the English were somehow descended
from people with a psychological propensity to save and invest rather
than leap at instant gratification.

The Democratic Party platform for 2008 and many of its candidates
complained that private sector workers have not enjoyed increased real
wages since the 1970s. Someone who had just finished read A
Farewell to Alms would respond "If American workers aren't better
educated than they were in the 1970s, why would you expect their wages
to rise?"

An alternative formulation of this question would be "If American
workers aren't better educated than Chinese, Indian, and Mexican
workers, why would you expect their wages to be higher?" This becomes
a problem for politicians because the U.S. government could not fund
itself by taxing workers paid at the Mexican level, even if it
confiscated 100 percent of their income.

Improving High School

"The U.S. high school graduation rate peaked at around 80 percent in
the late 1960s and then declined by 4-5 percentage points" (source: NBER). Given
that a high school dropout has less value as our jobs become more
complex, why not work on increasing the percentage of Americans who
graduate high school and also work on improving the quality of the
education delivered in high school?

High schools are run by governments and teachers' unions. High schools
need not compete for students; nearly every student in a particular
region is forced to attend a corresponding high school. Every attempt
at reform has been about as successful as getting the Pentagon to stop
paying $1000 for toilet seats. Colleges and universities, however,
tend to be smaller organizations, and they compete for students, which
provides some incentive to improve.

History of the University starting in 1088

University of Bologna, founded in 1088, mostly to teach the Justinian
Code, recently rediscovered. It made a lot of sense for professors to
lecture in the 11th Century. What other means of broadcasting
information from 1 person to 100 existed? Printing was very expensive
and cumbersome. Having monks make 100 copies of a textbook by hand was
not economically feasible.

The university incorporated an important quality control mechanism:
student associations paid professors according to how well they
taught, how many students were attracted to their lectures, and
whether they showed up on time.

It made sense for students to show up to lecture and to do their
homework. A student's lodging might not have been heated. It might
make sense to come to lecture simply to get warm. Students in 1088 had
no television, no radio, no Internet, no email, no instant messaging,
no mobile phone. A student might come to lecture for entertainment.

What about homework? Students in a pre-technological university would
do homework either in the library or at home. Both places lacked
television, video games, email, etc.

Modern University

Teaching technologies developed since 1088:

movable type

cheap paper made from trees

telephone

photocopier

email

Web

How has this changed the way classes are conducted? We still have
lectures and homework, just as in 1088. What other industry could
survive without adopting at least some of the technologies of the last
1000 years into its core processes?

Improved technology has rendered the traditional university
instructional method far less effective. The student has a warm cozy
apartment and will find sleeping late an attractive alternative to
attending a lecture (or watching Good
Morning America). The student sitting in lecture has some sort of
device capable of browsing the Web, sending and receiving text
messages, supporting games, displaying photos or video to an adjacent
student.

Focusing on homework has become much tougher. A modern dorm room has a
television, Internet, youtube, instant messaging, email, phone, and
video games. The students who get the most out of their four years in
college are not those who are most able, but rather those with the
best study habits.

No company would rely on this system for getting work done, despite
the potential savings in having each employee work from
home. Companies spend a fortune in commercial office space rent to
create an environment with limited distractions and keep workers there
for most of each day.

In the face of massive technological advances, the most significant
change that universities have made is removing their only quality
control mechanism. Through tenure, the university now guarantees
professors pay regardless of effectiveness.

Yale University

One argument for traditional lecture-based teaching is that
storytelling is a primal human activity. If the cavemen in the movie
2001 were learning from great storytellers, surely it must be the best
way to teach today.

A problem with this approach is that it depends on finding millions
of great storytellers.

0-4:30: name of course, name of professor, names of TAs, pictures
of TAs [all stuff that could easily have been on a handout or Web
site]

4:30-5:15: bragging about how many important people on Wall Street
took his course, bragging about how great the course is even for
people who aren't going on to Wall Street

5:15-6:20: talking about how every human endeavor involves
finance, e.g., if you're a poet it will help you get published to know
how finance works [my haiku: AIG bankrupt; your taxes gone to Greenwich; no one
hears your screams]

6:20-7: talking about an unrelated course, Econ 251, and who
taught it in previous years [big excitement at a university: some guy
other than the usual lecturer taught it because Kahuna #1 was on leave]

7-10: history of why two intro finance courses exist, glorious
biography of teacher of the other course, [after several minutes, we
learn that the other course has a bit more math]

10-11:30: show of hands for who is interested in organic chemistry,
discussion of how Robert Shiller is reading about this because he has
such broad intellectual interests [implicit comparison to finance
wizards, though Shiller is not able to cite an example of how organic
chemists managed to bankrupt their shareholders and wreck the world economy]

11:30-15:00: writes authors of textbook on blackboard, says it is
"very detailed", discusses reactions of previous classes of students
to this book, talks about his vacation in the Bahamas with some other
important guy, reading textbook by the pool unlike the other stupid
tourists who were reading novels. Discussion of what number the
current edition is. "I met a really prominent person on Wall Street"
who told him that his son had dropped out of the course because the
textbook was too hard. Apparently Yale students are too stupid/lazy to
read this book intended for undergrads at schools with more motivated
students.

15-16: discussion of how library is obsolete in the Internet age,
how Franco Modigliani is 2nd author of primary textbook, a Nobel Prize
winner, and "my teacher at MIT"

16-18: discussion of assigning Jeremy Siegel's Stocks for the
Long Run book and how it has sold more than 1/2 million copies [Why
do we need to pay $50,000/year to Yale to find books that are stacked
out front in Barnes and Noble]

18: discussion of assigning his own book, Irrational Exuberance,
and how he managed to time both the stock market crash of 2000 and the
housing market peak in 2005

19-20:15: all of these are on sale at Labyrinth Books, an
independent bookstore, as well as the campus bookstore. Talks about
how he likes to support independent bookstores. Talks about New Haven
bookstore that went out of business some time earlier. Helpfully
provides street address for defunct bookstore.

20:15-21: discussion of lecture and teaching section schedule;
there are six problem sets and they are due on Monday

21-22:30: this is one of the biggest classes at Yale [because we are
such great teachers]; how grades are determined, e.g., what percentage
are problem sets and exams, but then we use judgment as well [so
perhaps you can ignore the percentages just given]

22:30: writes first topic on the board, "Behavioral Finance", and
begins what might be considered actual teaching.

Does it get better after the first lecture? Let's look at Lecture
2, in which the first 10 minutes are spent on irrelevant story
from Hindu scripture. From 20:30-22:20, the Binomial Distribution
formula is written on the blackboard with no explanation:

A bit later Shiller presents the moderately scary formula for a Gaussian
Distribution with no explanation and says "I assume you're
familiar with this". Students at Yale must be very intelligent indeed
if they can understand the Binomial Formula and Gaussian Distribution
simply by looking at an expression. But if they are so smart and
math-nerdy, how do we explain this sequence:

50:30: begins ad nauseum explanation of present value calculation

53:40: we figure out the value of $1 a year from now

63: wraps up after having spent 13 minutes explaining something
much simpler than the Binomial Distribution, which had been dispensed
with in 2 minutes

This is one of the most popular courses at one of America's greatest
universities.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that 1.7 million Americans work as
college teachers (source). If Yale can't
find teachers who can use classroom time effectively, what hope is
there for universities with less money and prestige?

University of Phoenix

University of Phoenix, the startup for-profit school founded in 1976,
shows that you can deliver the same quality at one quarter the cost
and with a lot less pain inflicted on students. A student can keep his
or her job, attending University of Phoenix at night or attending
University of Phoenix Online at any time.

University of Phoenix charges less than other private universities,
about $12,000 per year in 2009 compared to an average of close to
$25,000. University of Phoenix earns a profit, and cannot draw on an
endowment. Public universities are relatively cheap, at an average of
$6,000 per year, but impose a heavy cost on taxpayers, rely on
donations, and generally require students to spend four years out of
the full-time traditional 9-5 workforce.

Why don't universities change?

Why should a university change? In order to graduate, a Harvard
student need not take a standardized test that is also taken by a
University of Massachusetts students; groups of MIT students need not
attempt projects in competition with students from Olin College of
Engineering. There is literally no way that a university can be
embarrassed by its graduates' poor overall performance. The
comparative scores of GRE exams taken by graduates of different
schools are not published. Even if they were, the GRE is basically the
same test as the SAT, so a prestigious school with a lot of students
who scored well on the SAT would tend to do well in a GRE competition.

Simple Change 1: Stop grading your own students

I once asked a group of professors at Makerere University in Uganda
"How come more people fail the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer
test than your most advanced computer science course?" It would seem
that the answer is that the MCSE, which tests the ability to do basic
Windows administration, is graded by an impartial computer system.

In the Internet age, a student's work is just as easily available to a
professor on either coast. Why then would a professor be grading his
or her own students? It is an invitation to dishonesty. A student who
has learned nothing will not receive an F because the professor
doesn't want to admit that his teaching hasn't been compelling and/or
effective. Having the professor be simultaneously teacher, coach, and
executioner sets up a bad dynamic in which students are afraid to
admit weakness and ask for help.

It would cost nothing extra to have teachers at University of Kansas
grade University of Massachusetts students and vice versa. The teacher
at U. Kansas supplies the U. Mass teacher with the course syllabus and
standards and the U. Mass teacher applies the standards without the
bias of "these are the students who just sat through some lectures by
the world's greatest genius, i.e., me."

[Note that this approach also eliminates bias based on race and sex,
assuming the grading is done through a computer system that hides a
student's name from the grader.]

Simple Change 2: Stop lecturing

Pedagogy researchers have found that people stop paying attention
after about 20 minutes. That's as long as a lecture should be at a
university. After 20 minutes, the students can starting working on
problems, either individually or in small groups, with the teacher
wandering around the room assisting groups as necessary. Even the
Federal Aviation Administration has figured this out. They discourage
flight instructors from lecturing without interruption. The
instructors knows what she said, but she doesn't know what the
students heard unless she stops and asks the students to answer a
question or solve a problem.

Of what use is the ability to sit passively in a lecture? How many
jobs are there in the U.S. that pay someone to do something like sit
passively in a lecture?

What if the teacher needs to communicate something to all of the
students in the class? That's why God invented email and the Web. If a
professor needs to summarize the best points made in a lab discussion,
that can be done via a broadcast email. If all of the students seem
confused about a point that isn't covered well in their textbook, the
professor can prepare a Web page on the subject and email it to the
students.

Modest Change: Build open offices for students

Given the expense of a university education and the importance of
having highly educated taxpayers to a heavily indebted U.S., it is not
acceptable to say "Some of the people who pay our high tuition dollars
will learn a lot; it depends on their study habits."

Students in 2009 should not be required to exercise super-human
self-discipline in ignoring the siren songs of email, Web, IM, Xbox,
telephone, etc. A college student should be able to show up to school
at 9:00 am, break for lunch at 12:30, return at 1:30 pm, and go home
at 7:00 pm, all work for the day completed.

Students should work in an open-office environment, where they can get
assistance from others sitting at adjacent desks and from roaming
teachers.

This system would require that curriculum flexibility be reduced or
that the cherished semester system be scrapped. If all sophomores
majoring in, say, Economics, were seated together, they would need to
be taking the same courses. An alternative would be to teach one
course at a time and group all of the students in that course together
for the three or four weeks of an intensive class. After the course
ended, the students might be reshuffled. This would interfere with the
semester system. Instead of teaching a few hours per week for 13
weeks, a professor would have to work hard for three or four weeks and
then would have a month off from teaching.

[The author of this article has some experience with this idea. He
founded a one-year post-baccalaureate program in Computer Science. The
curriculum was copied from traditional schools such as MIT and
Stanford, but each course lasted one month. The 37 students sat
together in a cubicle farm and worked on homework and labs
together. After ten months, they'd taken the ten core courses of an
undergraduate CS degree and 100 percent of the students who started
the program were able to perform competently as software developers,
applicants to Computer Science graduate school, and in other careers
typically chosen by people with bachelor's degrees in CS.]

Modest Change: Provide detailed review of all work; grade students
on their ability to assist other students

People whose work has not been critically reviewed seldom improve
dramatically. Yet a university does not want to spend enough on
teachers to ensure that all student work is carefully reviewed.

In the working world, someone who can do good individual work is
unlikely to be a critical asset to a company unless he or she is also
able to help others do good work, either by contributing to a
multi-person project or providing feedback on someone else's work. The
graduate of a traditional university curriculum has had almost no
experience in reviewing peers' work.

The solution to both problems is to build in substantial peer
review. In an engineering school, students should present their
designs to other students. If critical flaws are not caught during the
design review, that should be reflect badly primarily on the peer
reviewers, not on the design engineer. Students should learn to be
useful editors of each others' writing. If done through a
collaborative word processor, an outside grader would have easy access
to the first draft of a paper and the reviewer's comments. The grader
would be able to give feedback to the reviewer on the usefulness of
the comments.

Big Change for Engineering: Teach Engineering

Engineering is a multi-step process:

listen to a vague request from a customer

write down a precise spec

discussion with customer to ensure adequacy of spec

build a prototype

document the design for other engineers

test with users

refine

launch to a small number of users

refine

document for decision-makers ("white paper")

Someone who has been through this process, or cycle, multiple times
will be much more adept and comfortable than someone who has never
done it.

Consider the typical Computer Science graduate. He (for it is almost
always men who are dumb enough to major in this dreary subject) has
done a lot of problem sets, tackling small problems that were
precisely defined by professors. He has never met a client. He has
never been asked to do something that isn't doable in the allotted
time. He has probably never written more than one engineering
document. He may never have worked on an open-ended problem. The CS
graduate comes out prepared to work for an engineer, not to
be an engineer.

Surely this problem can be remedied by the first employer, right? In
poor countries, there aren't enough jobs for entry-level software
engineers for the average CS to have any hope of getting one. Most
will become system or network administrators. In developed countries,
the companies most eager to hire kids fresh out of college are the
largest firms. What the new graduate needs is to tackle 100 percent of
a small project, building up his skills at listening to clients,
writing specifications, and crafting prototypes. What the new graduate
gets is 1 percent of a big project, working on a precisely defined
slice handed to him by the real engineer supervising the effort.

Why isn't all of an CS undergrad's education done via open-ended
projects? Consider the requirement to take Physics 1 (freshman
mechanics). This could easily be replaced by the professor saying "I
would like you to build me a simulator for my home pool table." The
professor doesn't say what the interface should be or how detailed the
simulation must be. It is up to the students, who will organize
themselves into groups of 2 or 3, to figure out what is practical to
accomplish in a portion of the semester. It will also be up to those
students to work through exercises in a standard Physics textbook as a
subtask.

By the time our CS student completes college, he will have gone
through the cycle of "listen, design, discuss, implement, test,
refine, and write up" roughly 100 times. He shouldn't have any trouble
going through the cycle for the 101st time at his first job.

I have some personal experience with this approach to teaching in one
course at MIT: Software Engineering for Internet Applications (online textbook). I find real customers who need
online communities built. Course meeting time is devoted to teams
presenting either designs or prototypes and the other teams
criticizing. This prepares students to participate in engineering
design reviews. If nobody makes a suggestion I consider important, I
will make it myself at the end of a review or via email to the class
mailing list after class. If there is something that I want everyone
to know, I add it to the online textbook or email it to the class.

Occasionally we will use the meeting time for teams to work together
(sometimes paired with another team) on a data modeling challenge.
This works great in rooms with a lot of blackboards and after 20
minutes we start asking teams to present their work while others
criticize and comment.

Most evaluation is done by the clients (usually non-technical),
professional interface designers whom I bring in, and professional
software engineers whom I bring in as mentors and critics. The final
presentation and write-up is evaluated by a team of business
executives and venture capitalists; students are told to pitch the
project as though they were seeking follow-on funding. Instead of me
being the bad guy telling a student his work is substandard, I let the
client or outside consultant be the meanie.

How has it worked? The better graduates of the course are at Google,
Microsoft, or running their own startup companies.

I was asked by Neumont University, a startup for-profit computer
science school in Utah, for advice on how to structure the
school. They didn't know how unworkable these ideas were so they
adopted most of them. Because their student body consists of kids from
middle class families, there is no need for a long summer break for
students to join their parents on a grand tour of Europe. Nor need the
students take a month off in the winter to yacht around the
Caribbean. Simply by being in session Monday through Friday, 8-5, for
most of the year, Neumont is able to graduate CS majors in about 2.5
years. That's 1.5 years in which the kid is not coming home to ask his
parents for more money.

Neumont also adopted the idea of making
most learning project-based. Neumont freshmen start with
substantially lower SAT scores and high school grades than University
of Utah freshmen. With brighter and better-prepared students plus a
150-year headstart, how does U. of Utah's faculty do compared to
Neumont's? The graduate of U of U's traditional lecture-and-homework
CS program will be 1.5 years older than a Neumont graduate, start at a
lower salary, and have fewer job offers.

Low hanging fruit

The days in which the U.S. could get richer without getting smarter
are over. In 1970, a group of U.S. workers did not have to compete
with workers in China or India. There was no container
shipping. International phone calls were cripplingly
expensive. Internet connected only a handful of computers. The Crash
of 2008 is the first economic downturn from which the U.S. will have
to dig itself out in the face of genuine international competition.

Improving university education is one of the cheapest and simplest
things that we could do to improve the U.S. economy's long-term
prospects. The current system, in light of both the promise and
distractions of modern technology, is almost laughably poorly
designed. A well-designed system ensures that every student who shows
up on a regular basis will become competent.

Fat, dumb, and happy

Suppose that we don't succeed in making good use of the time that 14
million Americans are currently spending in college. The good news,
according to Gregory Clark's A
Farewell to Alms is that there is no evidence that the big
increase in wealth in Japan and the U.S. since the 1950s has made us
any happier, on average. Should per-capita income stagnate or fall, we
won't necessarily be less happy as a society. The bad news, though, is
that we owe a lot of money to bondholders, pensioned public employees,
and entitlement programs. Without per-capita income growth, the only
way to pay back all of that money will be to open the immigration
gates until the U.S. reaches a population density close to China's.

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Reader's Comments

The focus in universities appears to have shifted from education, to living the good life for four years. Universities these days have five-star dorms that cater to students' every whim (double decaf mocha latte at midnight, anyone?). How about we return to modest buildings and dorms (clean, but very basic accommodations) so the money can actually be spent on education? How about cost containment? Surely professors' salaries are not rising at 2-3 times the rate of inflation that tuition is rising at?

I'm not sure about an open office. I could study fine in my dorm room, which didn't have a computer or anything like that but in an office I'd have to deal with other people. Important at work but it wouldn't help me get my Chemistry book read.

U tended to like studying on my bed while swishing my legs around. Lying on the floor swishing your legs wouldn't be acceptable in an office.

That's not to say I wouldn't have benefited from more collaborative projects, but I need time alone to.

However, I agree about lectures being mostly useless. I often drew during lectures to stay awake.

The first day of Statistics 100 at the University of Michigan, the professor said our final grade was either the average score of our midterm and final, or the score of the final -- whichever was greater. Our labs and homework assignments did not impact our course grade. My roommate, also enrolled in the same course, didn't make the first class. I told him about the grading system. Neither of us attended another class, nor took the midterm.

Before the final, we spent two days straight, reading the material and doing problem sets. I got a B+. He got an A-.

I am ashamed to admit that I wasted all those lectures and labs that my family paid for. But what does it say about inadequacy and inefficiency of the lecture system when we arguably learned the practical application of our course material with 24 hours of self-study spread over two days and a $100 textbook?

Compare that with the cost of the lectures and labs -- 64 hours spread over 16 weeks and $3,861-5,791 in tuition (depends on course load, based on current tuition of $17,374).

The ideas encapsulated by "eventually most of the English were somehow descended from people with a psychological propensity to save and invest rather than leap at instant gratification" are the weakest part of Clark's argument. Unless there is a large body of genetic and psychological literature I am unaware of, this theory of economic eugenics is almost pure speculation. To the extent that it is used to "explain" the success of one country as compared to another it also carries very unpleasant racial overtones--- that the story of England's rise to power is a story of a genetically superior group of savers and investors vanquishing genetically inferior groups of savages who can think only of the present moment. If we take this seriously, we do not need to worry about educational systems if we want to preserve the standing of the US relative to other countries; we just need to adjust social conditions so that rich people have more surviving children than poor people. (Perhaps the children of rich people could _eat_ the children of poor people?)

You make the point that the main weakness of the lecture format is that it requires talented storytellers, and there simply aren't enough of them. For this to be a critique of the lecture _system_, and not just individual lecturers, one has to believe that we can't do anything about the number of good storytellers--- or at least that it is more expensive to change this than it is to introduce something different. Is it? Graduate schools could do much more to increase the lecture-giving ability of the PhDs they produce, at no additional cost. All of the programs I am personally familiar with currently have nothing specifically about giving lectures as a PhD requirement. And I have never heard of anybody being asked to leave a PhD program for not being able to give a decent lecture. What if we just changed that?

My personal feeling is that there is a lot of life left in lectures if we take them seriously, and there is nothing more practical about other models if they are implemented by the same group of people. If somebody makes a long lecture a waste of time, they will also make a short lecture and supervised group work a waste of time. At present, most PhDs are expected to learn teaching (in whatever format) by osmosis--- and it sometimes seems that the more elite the university, the less the hiring and firing depends on teaching ability. This does lead to very bad lectures at "very good" schools, but it is not itself a fault of the lecture-based model of instruction.

With hindsight(!) three of the greatest problems with the University education I received was the politicisation of the content of study in the Arts (anthropology/philosophy) faculties; the chasm that existed between the Arts and Science faculties (math); and overall the poor quality of the tenured staff and teaching practice. In math for example, proof theory was not taught systematically at all, the history of math was not presented systematically (which is fatal for understanding in an essentially cumulative science), and to cap it all off, complete proofs were not always presented. No wonder the dropout rate for math was catastrophic (from 300 students in year 1, to 100 in year 2, to 30 "mathematically minded" students in year 3). In both the Arts and in maths there has long grown up a ferocious in-group "professionalism" that is designed to keep outsiders out and insiders smuggly pleased with themselves and their "honest, hardworking, colleagues"; an educated layman cannot today pick up and read the average maths paper, nor understand the incomprehensible gibberish that is "post-modernism". Yet there is nothing at all in maths or philosophy say that is that difficult to understand, our current crop of "great" mathematicians are not Euler's and our "great" philosophers are not Aristotle's, not even close! My point being, that against this background, it doesn't make any difference at all whether information is presented in lecture format, or online, it is still mediocre rubbish on the whole. Listening to an intellectual post-modernist phoney like Derrida speak in person, or reading his "transgressive" effusions online makes no difference.

I completely agree with this article on many levels. I sometimes feel there is no education system in America. Most people I know who are particularly knowledgeable usually were lucky to have good mentors, usually parents. High school teaches very little useful skills - when was I supposed to learn how to file my taxes, write a check, change a tire, etc.? Of course you can learn these things on your own, but then what is our education good for? Most people I know who are good with cars learned from a relative. If you ask them a good resource to learn from, they will usually say 'Well, I don't know, I've just been working on cars since my dad had me in the garage as a kid...' The best programmer I know seems to not understand that his dad being a programmer probably exposed him to many things that the rest of sitting through 'Intro to MS Word' were not, and that probably contributed to where he is today. And if it wasn't for the internet, I don't think I'd be anywhere either.

Why do I clearly remember spending time being indoctrinated that marijuana was evil and underage drinking was a horrible crime and that the policies against it make sense but us teenagers are just a bunch of rotten apples? Why do I remember being bored out of my mind when we had to review old material yet against because a small percentage of the class failed the test, because in our 'no child left behind' culture the classroom must move at the rate of its slowest students? I could have been learning something useful any of those times.

And don't even get me started on how useless college is. I remember taking a Signals and Systems class where the professor would FLY through all sorts of Laplace and Fourier transforms as if we were supposed to learn them by osmosis, in the hour and a half lecture of dense math. It was impossible to concentrate for that long just sitting there and listening with no involvement. Adderall abuse was extremely common at my college, and I refuse to believe it's because we are in an ADD generation, but simply because we are asked for superhuman concentration.

Of course the smug professor just prefers to think his students are not gifted enough to follow his brilliance, and maybe I agreed when I dropped the class and temporarily left college. But when I decided to learn some of the material on my own time, grounded in the actual application of image processing, I realized it's not so difficult. It was just extremely poorly taught. There was no student participation, no grounding the theory in application (which is the whole point of engineering), and no time to really sit back and wrap your head around a concept before moving on to the next. Now I have all these things, and I guess I got some appreciation for why so many Americans are 'dumb'. Nobody's teaching them, and anybody who tries will get brow beaten by teacher's unions or university bureaucracy until they give up - and even the best teachers give up.

http://reason.com/archives/2002/07/01/stand-and-deliver-revisited

Fortunately, there is one gigantic beacon of hope and that is the internet, but as you mention, that may keep the world's education afloat, but it won't give Americans any sort of advantage. But at this point, it's clear this country doesn't deserve one anyway.

"I once asked a group of professors at Makerere University in Uganda "How come more people fail the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer test than your most advanced computer science course?" It would seem that the answer is that the MCSE, which tests the ability to do basic Windows administration, is graded by an impartial computer system. "

For the record, the MCSE does not teach basic Windows administration...it teaches engineering, designing, creating, and development of networks.

Basic Windows administration is defined as resolving desktop and server issues (ie system updates, adding removing objects to an existig infrastructure, NOT the creation of that infrastructure).

Equating an MCSE to basic Windows administration is a poor analogy to say the least.

Having said that, your point of bias in testing is a valid one, albeit made with a very poor example. Just say that there are inherent biases in grading ones own tests.